


three times the strength

by nowrunalong



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Superman - All Media Types, Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Light Angst, Scarecrow's Fear Toxin (DCU)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 06:58:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18845980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong/pseuds/nowrunalong
Summary: There’s only one chair. Bruce and Clark look down at it, and then up at each other. “Go ahead,” Clark says, and Bruce sits in it rather than arguing or going to stand stubbornly in a corner, which takes Clark so much by surprise that he suddenly isn’t sure what to do with himself.Diana is injured in Gotham City. Bruce and Clark fret and blame themselves.





	three times the strength

**Author's Note:**

  * For [renecdote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/gifts).



> This fic was written for the trinity Discord exchange. Ren... you're a super cool friend, and I hope I didn't derail your prompt too much. x

**Bruce: then**

Bruce knows fear. He knows how it feels when it settles in his stomach—knows how it feels to strike fear in the hearts of others, too. He is well acquainted with it. He has molded it into an art. He can recognize it as soon as it begins to manifest in widening eyes, quickening heartbeats, twitching fingers flipping a coin between fight and flight.

He knows there’s something wrong as soon as he sets foot in the warehouse.

“Diana,” he says urgently, running to her and dropping to his knees where she lies. She is shaking. He reaches out to touch her shoulder, but she recoils from him, wild-eyed. “Diana, what’s going on?”

A split-second later, he’s connecting with a support beam fifteen feet away. His back hits the wooden post with enough force to bruise (but not to break) and he crumples forward, breath knocked from his lungs. He gasps as he recovers the strength to inhale. “Diana!”

“Do not speak to me!” Diana hisses, towering over him now.

Bruce blinks. “What—”

“You should not be here!”

“Diana.” Bruce keeps his voice calm. “We agreed to meet here after—”

“ _Liar_ ,” Diana says thunderously. “I have made no such agreements with you. My mother told me that you were not to be trusted. She warned me of your trickery. Do you think me naive? I have spent scores of your years learning of the history of man. You will not find me with my shield down.”

Bruce drags himself back up. In a fight, he’d have recovered his footing already.

(This isn’t a fight. Something has happened to Diana.)

“Stay down.”

Bruce doesn’t, but he lifts his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Diana—what happened?”

“Stay _down_.” Diana grabs an old broom and snaps the head off in her hands; she jabs the splintered end of the wooden handle at the bat-shaped emblem on Bruce’s chest. Her voice shakes. “If you approach me again, I will not hesitate to stop your heart.”

“Diana,” Bruce repeats, urgency overtaking his calm. “What happened here?”

Diana’s blue eyes narrow into a glare more hateful than Bruce has ever seen on her face. “You _dare_ ,” she roars. “She is dead, and you dare to feign ignorance!”

(— _she is dead. Pearls clamor across the street in the deafening silence_ —)

“I was a fool to trust you. I will not make the same mistake again. My mother was right. You do not deserve my help, nor my compassion.”

(— _there is no reversing this, there is no way to go back, she’s not breathing, she’s_ —)

Bruce shakes his head to clear it, but his own heart is pounding now. “I’m—I’m not… Diana, who’s dead?”

His hands are clammy; he clenches them into fists. He needs to know what happened here. He needs to know how he can help, how he can _fix_ this, but—

“Soon, it will be you,” Diana says, and lunges at him.

 

**Clark: now**

“This is all my fault,” Clark says, scrubbing his hands through his hair in agitation. Stars twinkle behind him on the other side of the Watchtower’s windows, but he can’t feel the warmth of their light at all. “I shouldn’t even be allowed in here. Bruce, you should tell me to leave. I’m the last person she’ll want to see when she wakes up. I—”

Clark freezes in his chair as Bruce’s hand grasps his shoulder. In the midst of a haze of anxiety, he expects to be pushed away—but Bruce doesn’t let go, and after a moment, Clark takes a deep breath to steady his thoughts.

“Right,” he says, leaning slightly into the pressure of Bruce’s hand. “Right, it’s probably fine. She’ll—she’ll understand. She would have done the same thing in my place.”

“She’s told you as much,” Bruce murmurs. His thumb rubs circles into Clark’s back, and Clark closes his eyes. “On multiple occasions.”

“I know.”

Knowing it was the expected action to take doesn’t alleviate his regret of having taken it.

“She’ll probably be disappointed you didn't get to her sooner,” Bruce says.

Clark grimaces. “Don’t joke about this.”

“Who’s joking?”

“Bruce—”

“Diana will heal, Clark, and she won’t hold her injuries against you.”

Clark cracks open an eye. “And you?”

Bruce looks back at him impassively. “What about me.”

“Well,” Clark says hesitantly, “are you okay? Diana said some stuff that—”

“Diana was under the influence of a mind-altering substance. She didn't mean anything she said to me, nor to you, any more than you meant to break her arms.”

Clark’s eyes shut again. “Oh God,” he says. “Bruce… I saw her face when the bones cracked. She was surprised she could feel that much pain. I’ve known that feeling. The first time I was exposed to Kryptonite, I thought I was going to die.”

“Diana is rational enough to—”

“She was under the influence of a mind-altering substance,” Clark interrupts, parroting Bruce’s own words back at him. “She wasn’t capable of rational thought.”

Bruce’s hand stills on Clark’s shoulder.

“You don’t like the idea of Diana afraid,” Clark says after a moment, because he knows Bruce well enough to make assumptions about what he’s thinking—every so often, anyway. “You’re worried about her, too.”

“Everyone is afraid of something. Diana is no exception.”

“I guess even Amazons fear their own mortality sometimes.”

“No,” Bruce says slowly. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“What, then?” Clark asks, but Bruce lapses into silence, draws both his hands back into his lap, and resumes staring out the window.

Clark chases Bruce’s fingers with his own. They clasp hands quietly, mired in their own thoughts, until J’onn comes to retrieve them.

*

“She is resting,” J’onn says, as he leads Bruce and Clark down the hall to the Watchtower’s medical bay. “She resists most sedatives, but we were able to restrain her until the effects of Scarecrow’s toxin wore off. She put up quite a fight, and even grew weary enough to sleep, although she refused quite ardently at first.”

“Thank you, J’onn,” Clark says gratefully.

J’onn stops at the entrance to the medbay. “You are welcome. Diana is my friend also.” And then: “If she is asleep, please, do not wake her.”

“We won’t,” Clark promises.

He moves toward the bed, Bruce one step behind, and the door closes after them.

There’s only one chair. Bruce and Clark look down at it, and then up at each other. “Go ahead,” Clark says, and Bruce sits in it rather than arguing or going to stand stubbornly in a corner, which takes Clark so much by surprise that he suddenly isn’t sure what to do with himself. He shuffles his feet where he stands—crosses one foot over the other, and then uncrosses them again to stand tall. His arms hang stupidly at his side—the Superman suit has no pockets to shove them into. After a minute, he opts for crossing them in front of his chest.

Bruce doesn’t comment on his behaviour. Bruce isn’t looking at him.

Clark follows Bruce’s tired eyes to Diana’s unconscious form on the bed. Both of her arms are in splints. It’s unnatural to see her restrained. Of course, not even a displaced fracture could stop Diana from fighting if there were good reason to fight. It hadn’t been easy to get her here.

She had once told Clark that she will fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. Clark thinks that he and Bruce would fight for her if she were not able to, but that she would never allow it. 

(Perhaps it’s for the best. He isn’t worthy of fighting for her. It’s his fault she’s here at all.)

He wants to look away from her, but he can’t. He shouldn’t, for that matter. He should face the consequences of his actions—the depth of his error, of his failure.

Diana does not sleep peacefully. Her statuesque features are twisted into a light grimace that tugs at her mouth and eyebrows. Underneath her eyelids, her eyes dart from side to side.

Most days, she glows with an inextinguishable fire—fierce and all-consuming, a force of nature. The strength of a god or a sun burns at the heart of her, tempered only by her goodness and grace and her love for all life. Years ago, when they’d first met, Clark had been drawn to that immediately—her strength, her warmth, her heart.

(Her capacity for understanding. Her tireless kindness. Her boundless optimism.)

It isn’t the pallor of her skin that frightens Clark now—rather, it’s concern that her fire has been dimmed. That he was the one to throw the sand makes him sick to his stomach.

He has spent years of his life learning to control his own powers, but it has usually been his senses—his hearing, his vision—that have gotten away from him. He had learned to be gentle—to weave strands of pastry over an apple pie, to mend buttons, to smooth the feathers of a baby bird—before he’d learned to lift tractors and crush stone. Gentleness had come naturally to him.

It’s been over a decade since he’d so wildly underestimated his own strength. It’s dizzying. It’s terrifying. And Diana—

Diana is in pain, and she is in pain because of him.

“I’ll—I’ll be back,” Clark hears himself say over the thunder of his heart, and then he’s wrenching his lead-heavy feet from the floor and all but flying out the medbay doors.

 

**Diana: then**

Her heart is in her throat. She has never known it to beat like this—with such fervour, it seems likely to burn out like an overzealous star. She can hear her breath escaping around it, ragged gasps, too loud in the silence of the temple.

(She has never heard such a sound from her own lips, either. The thought speeds her heart even more.)

She clenches her fingers into fists. She cannot comprehend them. They quake like leaves in a thunderstorm, but aspen retains its solid trunk even when assaulted with treacherous winds, and Diana is unstable to her core. The trembling extends from her fingertips up through her arms, her spine, til her vision blurs. Her limbs tingle with an electricity that numbs her senses. Stars spark at the corners of her eyes.

The man lies in the dust where Diana has him pinned. She pushes the mask from his face.

Eyes like shards of ice meet her own. “Diana,” he says again. His voice is terrible and hoarse and it hurts Diana’s head.

He refuses to stop repeating her name.

“I should have killed you,” she says. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t, yet.

Her mother is dead.

Reality seems a very distant place from here. Everything around her unsettles her mind. She thinks that even if she were to kill this man, she would feel nothing at all. Would he bleed? If her hands were red with it, would they cease to tremble?

“Diana… look at me.”

Diana does. Her fingers shake against the beam she presses across his chest to keep him immobilized. It disturbs her, how much he appears to long for her recognition. 

He is a stranger to Themyscira. No man is meant to set foot here. 

“You speak as if we are friends,” she says, impassioned. “But we are not friends.”

The man closes his eyes and inhales deeply. She can feel his lungs expand beneath her. She presses harder on the beam and he grimaces. It takes all of her self-control not to scream—over and over, dreadful as a banshee—as if despair alone could strike him dead.

If he did not slay her mother, he will know the traitor who did. Guilt seeps from him like water from a cracked barrel, but—

But if it was not him, and she kills him now, then the answers may die with him.

“I will uncover your truth, intruder,” she tells him, with deadly intention.

He opens his eyes again.

(She has lived longer, but life has taken a greater toll on him. There are lines etched into his face at the corners of his eyes and above his serious brows. He is more weary than anyone Diana has known.)

“You already have,” he says.

“Stop.”

“You know me. Diana, goddammit, you _know_ me.”

“ _Stop_ ,” Diana thunders. She raises the beam again. She doesn’t know what she wants to achieve other than to make him _cease talking_. She cannot think, cannot slow her mind from its breakspeed pace.

In the moment she hesitates, someone else crashes through the ceiling behind her.

 

**Bruce: now**

Bruce has had his share of doubts about Superman. When he’d first emerged in the news, well—Bruce still believes that questioning the motives of a superpowered alien working as a do-gooder in America had been not only the natural instinct to have, but also the prudent one.

Today, however, Clark Kent might harbour more doubts about Superman than Bruce ever has. Clark has proven his heart a hundred times over—has earned Bruce’s trust and good faith more times than Bruce cares to count.

Clark leaves the medbay in such a hurry that a gust of air follows in his wake; Bruce pushes his hair back from where it falls across his forehead.

He knows that the mental burden of harming a friend will weigh heavily on Clark, but he wishes selfishly that Clark had stayed by his side. Bruce can only be in one place at a time. If Clark is not here, then Bruce must choose to be either with Clark, or with Diana—but not with both.

(It is entirely possible that Clark wishes to be alone right now. Regardless of whether or not that is true, however, it would be unconscionable to leave Diana alone and injured in an unfamiliar bed. Bruce will stay with her.)

He sits silently in the chair until the silence grows deep enough to lull him into a sort of peace—heart rate slow, eyes heavy-lidded and threatening to close.

A minute movement makes his head snap back up from where it had slumped, chin tilted down toward his chest.

Diana turns her face to him. Her eyes are open.

“Bruce.”

The sight of her awake overwhelms Bruce’s tenuous inner calm. He reaches for her hands, but—her arms are in splints. He isn’t thinking. His hands freeze for a moment, and then settle against the edge of the bed.

Diana watches his face pensively for a moment. When she turns her gaze from Bruce to the room surrounding them, though, she frowns.

“You’re in the Watchtower,” Bruce tells her quietly.

“I see that,” she says. And then: “I do not recall coming here.”

“I know.”

“What happened?” Diana eyes the splints around her arms. “What circumstances led me here? Bruce… was anyone else hurt? My memories are unclear. Did I—did I cause harm to anyone?”

Bruce feels sick. “No. Of course you didn't. Diana, it wasn’t your fault. You were conducting an investigation in Gotham to help me.”

“I remember this.”

“You were dosed by an airborne toxin developed by Jonathan Crane. The toxin is a powerful hallucinogen. It…” Bruce grimaces. He should have known about Scarecrow’s involvement beforehand. He should have properly equipped her. Her experience in the warehouse, her injury—all his fault. “It made you behave erratically.”

“I tried to kill you,” Diana surmises.

Bruce smiles wryly. “You did try to throw me through a floor.”

“Do not make light of this, Bruce,” Diana says warningly. “Such an attack could be fatal to you. If I were not myself, you would not be safe in my presence.”

Bruce doesn’t answer.

More gently, Diana asks: “Are you injured?”

Bruce’s back and chest are purple with bruising, but nothing is broken. The damage is insignificant compared to Diana’s own injuries.

“No.”

Diana will guess the truth, but she won’t press him. Bruce is comfortable with that.

“I am grateful to know I did not injure you severely,” she says, and sounds it. “But I am curious, also. Why is it I did not succeed?”

Bruce considers the question. Debates how best to explain the events that occurred without laying blame, and without alarming her.

“I had some help.”

Diana’s eyebrows raise in immediate comprehension and she twists to look about her.

“Clark,” she says, urgency deepening her voice.

“He’s here,” Bruce says. “On the Watchtower,” he adds. “He…”

Bruce doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, but Diana understands.

“I hope that he will return soon,” Diana says, resting her head back against the pillow and closing her eyes. “I would like very much to see him.”

 

**Clark: then**

“Stop,” Clark says with finality as ceiling debris cascades over his shoulders.

Diana turns on him whip-quick and thrusts a jagged wooden stick at his shoulder. It splinters harmlessly upon contact.

She isn’t okay. Clark had known as soon as it had occurred; he’d heard the unnatural escalation of her heartbeat from across the city.

Diana isn’t okay, and Bruce is in danger, and Clark—

Clark doesn’t know what to do.

“Diana,” Clark says. He attempts to keep a calm and reasonable tone. Diana is still as she regards him with dark eyes, pupils blown wide with terror. “We can talk about this.”

She doesn’t take to that suggestion at all.

“You,” she thunders. She reaches down to where Clark had cracked the floor upon impact and curls her fingers around the unstable concrete. Clark sees it coming, but doesn’t entire manage to evade it it: when Diana heaves up the flooring where he stands, he’s thrown backward. “You—it must have been—” She halts in her tracks and her gaze flickers back to where Bruce is half sitting, half lying on the concrete. “This _was_ because of you.”

“Diana… look at me,” Clark says, letting flight lift him back to his feet.

Diana ignores him. “ _You_ ,” she repeats, the word a dagger hurled in Bruce’s direction. “You came here, and you brought another. How many more are you hiding in the shadows?” She tenses her fists. “No matter. I will defeat your army, and you with it.”

On the floor, Bruce says nothing.

“When a leader falls,” Diana says, her words taking on a hue of false calm as she bends to lift a section of concrete large enough to crush a human, “his army will fall into disarray. My mother taught me this.”

Bruce still doesn’t move.

Clark tries again.

“Diana. You don’t want to do this.”

“You do not know me!” Diana screams. Muscles in her arms and shoulders strain as she holds the concrete above her head.

Clark inserts himself between her and Bruce, and lifts his hands—an open-palmed, peaceful mimicry of her own pose. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. That’s fine. But—if I don’t know you, then I’d like to. I’d like to talk. I’d also like for you not to squish Batman with a floor.”

Her heartbeat doesn’t calm one iota. 

When Diana looks him in the eye, then, Clark knows beyond a doubt that she cannot comprehend reason.

“I think you have talked enough,” she says fiercely.

If words won’t work, then actions must. Clark intercepts the concrete wedge with his own hands as Diana makes to hurl it downward. All that pressure she’d exerted forced back onto her, and—

—and she hadn’t been expecting it, because she’d forgotten what he’s capable of.

Her scream will reverberate in his ears for hours.

 

**Diana: now**

Bruce isn’t interested in speaking extensively, but Diana appreciates his quiet company. After many minutes have passed, she pulls her arms free from where they’ve been braced above her and rests them at her sides. She curls her fingers experimentally, and grimaces when jolts of pain spark in her forearms. Bruce’s watchful eyes miss nothing.

“It does not hurt so much,” she tells him, because it’s not more than she can manage, and because she knows that he worries.

Rather than answering, he reaches to take her hand that lies nearest to him. His touch is gentle, his presence solid and real.

Diana appreciates that solidity now. An unnamed discomfort prickles at her thoughts like an itch she cannot reach, but Bruce’s calloused skin is tangible and anchors her to this moment.

The door opens, and they turn in unison to face it.

In the doorway, Clark freezes. His eyes are clouded with anxiety. He will have known that she had woken: his concern leads him to listen for her heart.

“Clark,” she says, a soft greeting she hopes will convey her tenderness toward him.

In return, he smiles at her like he can’t help it. “Hey,” he says.

Diana pats the sheets beside her. “I was telling Bruce not long ago that I would enjoy your company.”

Unhesitantly, Clark crosses the room and sits down lightly on the side of the bed. He sets a bunch of daisies on the bedside table.

“They’re from my mother’s garden,” he says, gesturing to them as though his statement might have been unclear. “Diana—how are you feeling?”

Her arms are sore, but beneath the physical ache there is a hurt she has not yet been able to name.

“I… I am thinking, for some reason, of my mother.” She closes her eyes and pictures kneeling on a dusty temple floor. The image is vivid in her mind, although she has not set foot on the island for many years. “I have not seen her since I left Themyscira.”

If her mother were to die, Diana would not know of it until the hopeless chill of grief drifted across the world’s oceans and settled itself into her heart. It has not touched her yet, but there is nevertheless a sense of loss biting at her heels.

(Loss?

Diana can never return to Themyscira, and there are no other Amazons in Man’s World.

Perhaps it is also loneliness she feels.)

Clark takes her free hand, and Diana looks up at him. He is tangible and real like Bruce, and he radiates a warmth that softens the pain in her bones.

(Diana thinks that Clark has known loneliness like no other, just as Bruce has known tremendous loss. Neither voices their understanding of her, but it is evident nonetheless.

She is very glad to know them and to count them as her greatest friends.)

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up,” Clark says finally.

“What happened was my fault,” Bruce says, his voice quiet but certain. “All of this could have been avoided if I had taken a better approach to this investigation.”

“If your ‘better approach’ involves conducting your investigation on your own, I do not wish to hear it,” Diana tells him firmly. “Our mission is filled with many dangers. It is inevitable that on occasion we will feel the effects of those dangers. It does not mean we should not face them. Even more, it does not mean that we should face them alone.”

She pulls herself up into a sitting position. Bruce’s hand finds her shoulder, providing wordless support.

“I do not want for you to blame yourselves,” she continues. “Neither do I want apologies. I will not tell you of my forgiveness because there are no wrongs to forgive. My bones will mend themselves, and I will be no weaker for it. We function as a team. We will learn to overcome our failings together, and when our next challenge is upon us, we will know even greater strength.”

She sees in their faces that neither will argue her point. Good. Diana is confident that she would win, but she does not desire to fight any more today.

Not even with words.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Clark asks.

Diana wants only for Bruce and Clark to stay at her side, but they know this already. There is need to ask.

That they have offered her this without question fills her heart with affection for both of them.

“I would like a coffee,” she says, “in an hour, perhaps.”

For now, she holds onto their hands and she doesn’t let go.


End file.
